WEAK COMEDY'S PLOT DOESN'T THICKEN, IT CLOTS

Town & Country is way too lame to make it into American movie history. But it just might qualify as a footnote to American political history.

Late in the film, there's a scene in which Charlton Heston, the firearms advocate and one of the most outspoken conservatives in Hollywood, goes berserk and points a rifle at Warren Beatty, the free-lance gadfly and one of the most politically active liberals in Hollywood.

I wish I could tell you that the scene is funny. Town & County, after all, is a comedy, and funny is something you look for in those. But the scene is just sort of, well, bizarre.

And so is the film as a whole.

Beatty plays Porter Stoddard, affluent Manhattan architect and faithful husband of 25 years to Ellie (Diane Keaton), his artist wife. But just as the movie is beginning we discover that Porter has cheated on Ellie for the very first time.

Porter's indiscretion with a comely cellist (Nastassja Kinski) sets off a chain reaction that affects not only his and Ellie's lives, but also the lives of their best friends, Mona (Goldie Hawn) and Griffin (Garry Shandling), who are having marital problems of their own.

It also sets Porter off on a series of affairs and near-affairs with a woman dressed as Marilyn Monroe (Jenna Elfman), a jet-setting heiress (Andie MacDowell) and somebody else that I can't tell you about without ruining a big surprise.

No, stop.You know I hate it when you beg.

Directed by Peter Chelsom (The Mighty) from a script by Michael Laughlin and Buck Henry (who has a cameo as a divorce lawyer), Town & Country is what is known in show business as a "troubled" production.

I'm talking budget overruns, public finger-pointing, endless delays, panicky reshoots, changing opening dates, last-minute critics' screenings, etc. A couple of movies like this a year and a Hollywood gossip monger could put his kids through college.

Now, I love it when these "troubled productions" turn out to be good anyway, as in the conspicuous case of Titanic. But this leaky craft is something else again.

I hate to say it, but this time the gossip mongers are right.

Town & Country (which opens today) starts off well enough. The mood is bubbly and Beatty is at his bright, eternal-undergraduate best.

But as the plot thickens -- or, rather, clots -- there are so many idiotic complications, implausible reversals, loose ends and flat-out buffoonery that the good will of the opening is utterly lost. If I had to point to a single moment when the picture becomes hopeless it would be the scene in which Beatty first appears in his polar bear suit.